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Re: initial thoughts on issue #3818: fix handling of externals in wc-ng

From: Stefan Sperling <stsp_at_elego.de>
Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2011 21:16:25 +0100

On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 08:52:18PM +0100, Bert Huijben wrote:
> I think just seeing every node below a workingcopy as a node in the parent
> working copy will make things harder instead of simpler. So I would suggest
> moving the redefining of normal externals to 1.8. (But I still think we have
> to fix some file external issues for 1.7).

I understand your concerns, but I'm afraid fixing file externals isn't
the only problem we have :(

As explained in issue #3818, flagging a tree conflict on an external
is broken, which is a regression from 1.6.x.
Trying to fix that, it's easy to see that other things like status on
conflicted externals is also broken. Basically, every caller of
svn_wc__db_wcroot_parse_local_abspath() has potential problems with
opening the wrong wc.db that need to be worked around.

I'd rather try to fix externals properly than adding workarounds.
It seems as if there was an assumption that externals would just
continue to work as they did in 1.6. But at least in this one case,
we already know that this isn't true. How likely is it that there
are more problems lurking that our test suite isn't currently exposing?

So, yes, it might be less effort to add workarounds for known-broken
cases than changing the way externals are handled in a more fundamental way.
Would you rather go the route of adding workarounds for now?
I could try that, but it doesn't feel very reassuring because I'd like
1.7 to be a very good quality release.

I also don't think that fixing file externals in the current 'design'
(or lack of it) will be easy. So we might as well try a new design.
We can still consider adding workarounds when the proper solution
takes too long to mature to make the release in time.
I'm happy to try this out on a branch first to avoid making things
on trunk any worse than they are now.
Received on 2011-02-23 21:17:03 CET

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